In this dream imagery we have a wonderful example of how the unconscious uses things we know from everyday life to tell us a story. And in this story we have an effort to make coffee – to release something from its confined state. And we have cats and dogs with their different natures, and we have water and milk with their different natures. And each of these elements holds a certain energetic essence that we can understand and relate to, which is how all dream images are used in the effort of our higher systems to speak to us in ways that we already understand. In fact, each person dreams in their own vocabulary of references and meanings. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.) This post was originally published in December 2017.

Jeane: I had a dream in which I seem to be working in a somewhat confined, felt almost like underground, space, or at least a confined space with other people. It felt like there was an overseer somewhere.

It’s like we were assembling all the ingredients for something. It might have been something as simple as coffee, but we only had the dry ingredients. And there would be times when we would try to introduce a wet ingredient, but milk didn’t work. And if cats came around the whole process didn’t work at all.

But if dogs came around, it didn’t seem to make a difference. But mainly there were two things I was doing, one was I was trying to find a way we could assemble and introduce at some point a wet ingredient, and that was just not getting it right yet, although if you had a wet ingredient water was going to work better than milk at this point in time.

And the other thing that seemed to be going on is, on another level, I seemed to be searching for someone that I used to know. It was a woman that had actually been in a relationship with another woman I knew, and I could find the one woman, but I couldn’t locate what had happened to her friend.

So I was just struggling to try to get the whole process to work at all, once you introduced the final ingredients, or something, or how you could do that. And so it was like the two themes kind of got intertwined. But that was about all I could remember from it.

John: Well, what’s striking here is, cats didn’t work in the scenario because cats are precocious, and dogs are considered the friend. In other words, the dog takes and relates to what you want or need as your friend. It supports you. But cats are precocious; you have to win them over.

And water works better than milk. Water again is more general. Milk is more specific. Water is colorless. Has a more translucent, colorless quality to it. Milk has a distinction in which there’s an effect. Milk is often associated with a type of purity effect, but it’s a designed purity effect. Water doesn’t have any of that to it. It leaves everything as is. It’s more of an invisible overallness.

So you kind of have to figure out how those two uses of energy apply. A cat that is precocious is more raw energy than a dog that subordinates, and is your friend, and goes along with however it is that it’s trained to be. A cat, you can’t abuse a cat or it’ll go wild, more raw energy.

And milk, in relationship to water, milk I suppose can be a belief, or spiritual quality, when water leaves everything in its overallness. It doesn’t try to distinguish or anything. So water works better than milk, and dogs work better than cats.

And so this is all done in relationship to trying to jumpstart yourself, in other words, to try to heighten something, to speed something up. And so you’re not yet able to figure out how to make it fluid, so you’re settling with just trying to get the components together for something that can then take a step forward or be speeded up.

And, energetically, you’re looking at a conduciveness, so the conduciveness you’re looking at you’re not able to get it to flow. It’s almost like you know part of it, but you’re still sorting out the other part. In other words, in my opinion, I think you’re right that water works better than milk because water is neutral, and something that’s neutral doesn’t go off and perhaps go into any kind of tangential way, even if that tangential way leads to a greater purity or something, it leaves everything alone. It’s neutral.

And when it comes to speeding something up, you have to have a neutral approach or otherwise you’re going to disturb. You have to be very neutral in your nature or you’ll disturb, you’ll impose. But when it comes to cats and dogs, yes, you can be friendly, but you can also be precocious. If you’re friendly you can make yourself more acceptable and you can get closer to the situation, but do you limit yourself in some way by doing that?

And yet a cat can’t get necessarily closer to the situation unless it’s on its own terms. It is a raw energy that has to be pacified. That’s a tougher call because, in the short run, the friendly energy works better. It leads to more openness and helps facilitate the free flow. However, the cat energy is an interesting energy in that it is actually more contractive because it is pushing off, and yet when it is able to let go it has a more soothing, rather than obedient, effect upon things. It can have a more soothing effect. It purrs and everything. It gets into a nice lilt.

A dog always stays at a point of attention in a subservient way. A cat, when it’s in its raw energy state, is more precocious, and then when it chooses to intertwine it can let go and go into this interesting purring state that’s very, very soothing. So in the long run if you can work with the raw energy, the cat energy, you can accomplish more.

And so what you’re trying to do is you’re working with this in terms of the schematic of speeding something up – in order to see. So you’re using the comparison between a cat and a dog and water and milk. Now water’s more important to the overall, for coffee, and for releasing what’s necessary to be released, for purposes of something working as an aspect that speeds things up. And if you’re just doing this in a literal way, you can do it faster with dog energy, with friendly energy. But if you’re trying to do this to a greater depth, and you’re trying to have a greater depth with it you would need more of the cat energy, the raw energy that gets to a purring which reaches the soothing quality state.

So in the long run it’s better if this opens up before it seals, or becomes effectuated, in your nature. It’s better if you can open up to the cat energy in the process, along with the water. In the short run, for expediency purposes, the other works and the cat energy and the water can appear to oppose each other, initially. In the long run however this leads to something that’s a better end result.

Well, you’re not there with that better end result, and there is something about the friendliness of the dog that must bother you in some capacity because you’re not doing it. You’re still trying to figure out the best way of doing it. A cat energy is going to enjoy a dark area better than a dog energy. Yes, you would need the dog energy to try to get close enough, to create a friendly enough atmosphere, to figure out what the components needed to be to be put together.

But in terms of the actual release of the energy, of the qualities of something that speeded something up and can facilitate a greater seeing, the cat energy would then come into play. You would have to use both. So that means in terms of the water you’d have to actually use both, too, because the milk’s going to be important in the end, like a cream, to finish the coffee.

So you’re going to need water to begin with, you’re going to need dog energy to begin with, but then for the depth you’re going to need the cat and the milk. And in terms of the expediency of something, if you try to do it with just dog and water you can only go to a certain depth, to a certain point. To go to a greater depth you need to utilize the milk and the cat.

Some part of you knows that, or you wouldn’t have created that contrast to try to unfold. You created that contrast in order to better understand an intertwining – because everything is correlated, and when you live in a dense outer world you tend to look at this looking like that, and that looking like that, and you don’t necessarily see the correlations. And therefore you keep things distinct, and then as part of a process of an energetic release that is all pervasive in things, it has to be an energetic that’s composed out of everything in the environment. It can’t be an energetic that goes back and forth.

And, of course, there are qualities of things like the milk that gets ingested and turned into a product, a byproduct of all of that, which has healing capacities, nurturing capacities. In other words, you have to work with all of the components, some that are just generic like water, and then others that are refined like milk.

And a human being needs to find acceptance in order to function, which is a dog energy, but comes to realize that there is something so much more that can be found in a more soothing way, even though it may not look like it, when you work with the precociousness of a raw energy like a cat. So you’re sorting out animal energy, which is an interesting feature of the feminine nature.

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